Dounreay:Britains 2nd commercial reprocessing plant
01 January 1991
Dounreay:Britains 2nd commercial reprocessing plant
artdoc March=1992
NENIG Briefing no 40 May 1990
SUMMARY: Dounreay has moved further into commercial
reprocessing with an important new contract to store and
possibly reprocess fuel turned away from America because of
environmental concerns: A nuclear waste dump at Dounreay came
a step closer when the UK Government gave permission for test
boreholes to be drilled: The decision came as North Sea and
North Atlantic Governments prepare to meet to consider
international controls on subseabed waste repositories.
* STOP PRESS: On Wednesday 23rd May the UK nuclear waste
company NIREX applied for permission to drill 6,000 (Six
Thousand) shallow boreholes for seismic tests in a 3,000 acre
site around Dounreay. This is part of the programme to test
Dounreay as the site for UK national radioactive waste
repository. Similar seismic test have not been carried out,
or permission applied for, at the other possible site - the
Sellafield reprocessing plant. See Report 3.
Briefing Reports
1: Reprocessing Work Increases
2: Liquid Sodium Leak
3: Nuclear Waste Dump
1: Reprocessing Work Increases
Dounreay is about to sign an important new Ã6 million contract
to store and possibly reprocess spent Highly Enriched Uranium
(HEU) fuel from three research reactors in Spain, the
Netherlands and West Germany. The contract will increase
shipments of highly radioactive material in the North Sea and
North Atlantic.
There are two reprocessing plants at Dounreay: the main plant
extracts plutonium and uranium from Dounreay's fast breeder
reactor's spent fuel and has a design capacity of 8 tonnes a
year. The second, smaller reprocessing plant, reprocesses
enriched uranium fuel from research and Materials Testing
Reactors (MTR). The plant was built in the 1950s, but its
design capacity has been increased from 500 fuel assemblies a
year to 1,000. This subsidiary plant had reprocessed over 40
tonnes of MTR fuel by the late 1980s.
Since the 1950s the United States has provided many countries
with HEU fuel for research reactors. These agreements have
included proliferation clauses as HEU is of strategic
importance in the production of nuclear weapons.
In the past, spent fuel from the three reactors involved in
the new contract has been returned to the United States where,
after reprocessing, some has been used for driver fuel in
military production reactors at the Savannah River Plant in
South Carolina.
In the past five years the US Government faced increasing
opposition to HEU fuel shipments. (Unlike the UK and European
countries, transportation of spent fuel is uncommon in the
United States.) Court Orders eventually forced the US
Department of Energy (DoE), in December 1988, to announce "a
moratorium", or ban, on all HEU shipments until it completed
an environmental assessment report. The ban has since been
renewed by the DoE and the report has yet appeared.
The ban has caused problems for the reactor operators. Unable
to send fuel to the USA for reprocessing, their storage space
is running out. But now the UK Government has agreed to allow
spent HEU fuel from the three reactors to be stored for up to
four years at Dounreay. The contract includes the option to
have the fuel reprocessed at Dounreay, or returned after four
years, when the nuclear industry hopes the USA will have
lifted its ban.
The three European reactors concerned are: one of Spain's two
research reactors; the European Commission's High Flux Reactor
in Petten, Netherlands; and the Hahn-Meitner Institute reactor
in Berlin. The Berlin reactor is currently shut down, mainly
due to political pressure, after a maintenance shutdown.
Dounreay's reprocessing plant operators, AEA Fuel Services
Limited (one of the commercial companies run by the UK Atomic
Energy Authority) states that when the contract is signed
(confirmat